"The villainy you teach me I will execute," became a living, bloody issue. This did not apply alone to the Sioux nation, but to the Chippewas as well. These people have always been friends of the whites, and have uniformly counselled peace; but broken pledges and impositions filled the friendly ones with sorrow, and the others with anger. The commissioners, no doubt, rectified the wrong as soon as it was brought to their notice, but the Indians were plucked all the same and had sense enough to know it. Our country is cursed with politicians--the statesmen seem to have disappeared; but, the politician grows like rank weeds and the desire for "boodle" permeates our municipal, state and national affairs. Our Indian system has presented a fat field so long as these wards of the nation submitted to being fleeced by unprincipled agents and their gambling friends, but at last, the poor Indian is aroused to the enormity of the imposition and the innocent whites had to suffer. In some instances the vengeance of God followed the unscrupulous agent and the scalping knife in the hand of the injured Indian was made the instrument whereby this retribution came. There has been a great deal said of Indian warriors--we have read of them in poetry and in prose and of the beautiful Indian maiden as well. The Sioux warriors are tall, athletic, fine looking men, and those who have not been degraded by the earlier and rougher frontier white man, or had their intellects destroyed by the white man's fire-water, possess minds of a high order and can reason with a correctness that would astonish our best scholars and put to blush many of our so-called statesmen, and entirely put to rout a majority of the men who, by the grace of men's votes hold down Congressional chairs. Yet they are called savages and are associated in our minds with tomahawks and scalping knives. Few regard them as reasoning creatures and some even think they are not endowed by their Creator with souls. Good men are sending Bibles to all parts of the world, sermons are preached in behalf of our fellow-creatures who are perishing in regions known only to us by name; yet here within easy reach, but a few miles from civilization, surrounded by churches and schools and all the moral influences abounding in Christian society; here, in a country endowed with every advantage that God can bestow, are perishing, body and soul, our countrymen--perishing from disease, starvation and intemperance and all the evils incident to their unhappy condition. I have no apology to make for the savage atrocities of any people, be they heathen or Christian, or pretended Christian; and we can point to pages of history where the outrages perpetrated by the soldiers of so-called Christian nations, under the sanction of their governments, would cause the angels to weep. Look at bleeding Armenia, the victim of the lecherous Turk, who has satiated his brutal, bestial nature in the